


an entire world to lose a friend in

by celestialagenda



Category: Dream Team - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, Angst, Coding, Enemies to Friends, Friends to Enemies to Friends, Gen, Mild Angst, Minecraft, NOT a romance this is about friendship, Ready Player One inspired, Robots, Science Fiction, Technology, idk how to tag, mostly lighthearted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28373667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialagenda/pseuds/celestialagenda
Summary: ever since 2022, arcadia, the world's biggest tech company, has owned everyone and everything. you wanna rebel? good luck.in 2038, clay took that literally.and he got away with it.but 4 years later, just when nick and george thought he was gone for good, they see a message from him amidst a giant hack of the company they work for, causing violence across the world.now if it really is clay doing this hack, whose side do nick and george pick? their old best friend, or the company they've proved ever-so-loyal to?
Relationships: Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF)
Kudos: 10





	1. arcadia

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this on a whim today. hope you'll enjoy! just wanna be clear, this is about platonic relationships! i've been really into some sci fi stuff lately, and had the idea for this story before i put in characters. kinda felt like their characters could fill in well, so i decided to do this! i really wanna get motivated to write more, cuz i think it could end up being pretty cool :] enjoy!

The code must have been wrong. SOMETHING was wrong. But nobody knew what it was. People began to lose their minds about 20 years after Arcadia’s creation. And this wasn’t just a “I’m going crazy!” type of losing your mind. No, this was mania. People behaved erratically, bizarrely, leaving others wondering in fear whether or not Arcadia was indeed the cause of this chaos. It was as if someone flipped a switch for people to just absolutely lose their minds, and the accounts of this behavior were growing at a steady rate. 

And, keep in mind, this came almost 18 years after Arcadia had taken over the net as the sole proprietor of shopping, gaming, and virtual lifestyle applications - people finally began to question their authority. Arcadia began as any other company, back in 2022. Similar to Facebook around in the 2010s, they had a monopoly on social media and communications, owning almost every widely used application out there (or, at least, if they didn’t yet, they would). 

They owned everyone’s data. If you thought you could somehow separate yourself from Arcadia, you were wrong. After making all stores and shopping experiences automated, citizens around the world were forced the make Arcadia accounts in order to… well… live their lives. You couldn’t enter a supermarket without scanning your hand using the RFID chip implanted inside. 

How did it get to this point, you might be wondering? How did Arcadia become this powerful? 

Truth be told, nobody is really sure. It seemed as though they grew mainly in the shadows, and before anyone knew it, governments were rolling out new policies in order to integrate Arcadia technology into the lives of all citizens. 

So we start 20 years after Arcadia’s creation, the year 2042.


	2. keepers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> George gets sent a mission by his admin. What he finds is a little shocking, to say the least.

London didn’t look too good, truth be told.

Neither did New York. Or Seoul. Or Hong Kong. Or Dubai. Or any of the major information hubs housing central Arcadia servers.

Buildings had been burnt, shot down by drones searching for rule breakers.

“How did we even let it get to this point…” he muttered, mainly to himself, sitting atop a building in central London.

He sighed, and leaned back against a pillar, staring at some of the remains of St. Paul’s Cathedral, as he took in the crisp morning air. The Thames was dark, sloshing as the water hit the river banks way below him. He closed his eyes.

George was an A-Keeper. He worked for Arcadia, in the London division. The job of an A-Keeper was to keep services running, but with some… human relations included.

The funny thing about A-Keepers is that they don’t need much experience in human contact. They could be extremely awkward, for all Arcadia cared, but they just needed to be able to run Veribots––robots that allowed Arcadia’s top engineers (Keepers) to interact with the real world––extremely well. A-Keepers were much more skilled in robot control than the regular engineers of the company, who worked solely on software development. In fact, George had moved up from being an A-Engineer, after winning one of Arcadia’s in-house competitions in which one a year, engineers were permitted to battle Veribots to the death.

His wristband buzzed. George opened his eyes and sighed, before double tapping his band to show the cause of the alert. A hologram projected options above his wrist, where he saw the notification was coming from his ArcChat inbox, Arcadia’s messaging system. He clicked to open:

**URGENT SECURE MESSAGE. PLEASE ENTER CODE TO REVEAL.**

Urgent? The last time a message had been urgent, another building in London was blown up when George’s team failed to neutralize their target. Great.

He entered in the admin code for his team.

**Welcome, GEORGE. Please allow camera access to scan your surroundings for secure location verification sequence.**

George pressed “allow” in order to let his wristband scan for anyone around him that could be eavesdropping.

**SCAN COMPLETE. Please listen to your secure message as promptly as possible. After 5 minutes of inactivity, a new scan will be required.**

It had been a little while since George received such a high-level message. He pressed play, and a familiar voice came to life.

“George! My DUDE! I miss your stupid face.”

George chuckled and rolled his eyes. Sapnap.

“I’m sure you’ll be listening to this right after I’ve sent it. I don’t label things ‘urgent’ for nothing.”

This much was true.

“Anyway. I hope you’re doing well. I’d assume you’re probably sitting all melancholy-like staring at some… body of water as you tend to do,”

Oddly accurate. Was he really that predictable?

“I need a favor. Well, I guess not really a favor. More of a mission, I suppose. We’ve been consistently receiving notice of an Arcadia user not doing their check-ins in your area. Not only that, but we’ve also been detecting attempts at multiple cracks into our London servers coming from the same IP address. Now, I know that if someone is trying to make their way into our servers, they probably wouldn’t be doing it on their own IP. You know that too.”

This started off a little weird. Sapnap was correct though, anyone attempting to break into the servers would at least be smart enough to not leave such an obvious trace. So perhaps they were trying to frame someone, already in trouble for not fulfilling daily health checks, for their attempts.

“I need you to just quickly go check out whoever is living at the location of that IP. I’ve sent you the address already. I would tell you to go through Veribot, but to be honest, but the profile of this person, it might be better that you just go yourself. You’ll see. It shouldn’t be dangerous. If you’re worried, just set up your Veribot down the street. I don’t think you’re going to find whoever is doing the hacking there, but this might be the start of a larger problem, and so I’m marking this urgent. If it gets any worse, we are going to need to get the team back together. Anywho, I’ll catch you around Georgie. Report as soon as can. See ya!”

And the recording closed off.

Slightly confused, George closed out of his recordings tab. It seemed a little rash for Sapnap to label something so seemingly harmless an urgent task this early. Either way, Sapnap was kinda his boss.

Sapnap used to work in the same A-Engineer crew as George. In fact, they were best friends. His real name was Nick, but George became so accustomed to calling him Sapnap during their jobs it kinda stuck. Sapnap had proved himself worthy of moving up the ranks, as George did, but not through Veribot battles; after seeing his skillful work, M-Engineers (the engineer managers) assigned him to be team leader on a highly secretive task. He took George with him as a team member, along with 3 other engineers. The managers were so impressed with his success on the task that Sapnap was moved up to be a M-Keeper: a keeper manager. So yes, technically, he was George’s boss, in certain cases. They still worked together on missions though, including the previous failed urgent mission (that George led), which hurt both of their reputations.

George snapped out of his little walk down memory lane and stood up to get on with his task. A ding came from his wristband, signaling that the location Sapnap sent had just arrived in his inbox. He set his Veribot to meet him at the location and started calibrating his teleporter, as he was one of the few A-Keepers that was highly ranked enough to have one. His teleporter signaled it was ready, and he was transported immediately over to where his Veribot was located at the end of the street.

Stumbling a little, he grabbed onto his Veribot for support. Teleportation was never a simple feat, and George was easily nauseated. He set his Veribot, standing at around 6 feet tall, to auto-control and left it there as a sentinel as he made his way to the apartment location.

60 Willard Road. He approached the door and took a deep breath, shaking a little. It had been a while since he had an in-person mission, lacking the safety and security of sitting in the office controlling his Veribot remotely.

3 knocks. He took a step back.

He heard some movement as someone was clearly trying to determine who the man standing outside of their front door was. George’s glasses alerted him that there were two cameras pointed at him, connected to the IP inside the house, so they could clearly see who was there.

The door opened. A boy came into view.

“Hello..?” The boy said, cautiously.

“Good afternoon, Thomas” George affirmed, viewing the boy’s name through the projection inside his glasses, trying not to show his confusion at being greeted by a young teenager. “I work for Arcadia and have been notified that you have not been completing your health checks. I understand that this is not your first offense, and before I question you further, I am going to require you to fill one out in my presence.”

The boy looked a little stunned but didn’t move to open up his phone. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t think anything of it, I’ve just been forgetting.”

He was lying. Arcadia bots will remind people to do their health checks daily and prevent a user from being an active member of society if they fail to do so. If he was avoiding his health checks, he wouldn’t be allowed into restaurants, stores, and more. His computer might even lock him out.

“I’m going to ask you, respectfully, not to lie to me, Thomas. I know quite a lot about how these systems work. There is no workaround for you to avoid your health checks in our system. Now please, fill out your health form. I really would not like to resort to making this into a more severe problem.”

“Why did you come? Why not just one of those bots that show up to the door, like I’ve seen happen to others?”

Clearly the boy was able to do something to the bots visiting him that allowed him to skip the checks. But that would be wildly too advanced for the capabilities of just any teenager. Plus, if a teenager _did_ have that ability, they’d probably have been recruited by Arcadia by this point, George thought, thinking back to his own experience. So, something wasn’t adding up. How did he skip these checks, and why?

“I was sent here by admin,” George replied. “You’re clearly doing something noticeable, as much as you think you may be going under the radar.” George hated how he sounded, speaking to this kid. He felt bad.

“I swear I didn’t know! I think someone disabled my health requirement! I’m serious! A bot once showed up at my door, asking about this, but as soon as it showed up, it turned around and walked off.”

What? A bot just… left? There’s no way. If someone was controlling that Veribot, and didn’t do their job, it would have been a _big_ deal in the offices. No way that went unnoticed.

“Show me. Prove it. Do a health requirement in front of me.” George took a step forward.

“Okay! Okay. I will. Look.” Thomas pulled out his phone, and opened up the health app. But then, when the app opened, George saw it too. The button used to fill out health checks was … gone? It didn’t even show up. Very, very odd.

George thought for a second. He could log into Thomas’s account and see what was going on. That seemed to be the logical first step. “Thomas I’m going to access your account right now.”

Thomas opened his mouth to protest, but George’s engineering team had already logged in. Through his glasses, he was viewing all of Thomas’s account settings. Nothing seemed odd, but there were bits of code that seemed corrupted. Except- wait a moment.

The entire health file was corrupted. Pieces were also encrypted, as if someone was trying to hide something inside the corrupted file.

“Thomas, do you know _anything_ about coding?” George asked skeptically. The encryption was weirdly advanced for some regular teenager to have done.

“N-no not at all. I literally just post videos of me gaming on ArcTube, I don’t even know the first thing about coding.”

George believed him. And by a quick search, he wasn’t lying about posting the videos either; Thomas had a bit of a following, too.

But this seemed a little more suspicious than he was expecting. George told Thomas to go back inside as he made a call to Sapnap.

“Hello?” Sapnap answered.

“Sapnap, this is weird. The kid living there doesn’t even have access to his health checks. Check out what I sent you.”

“Yeah, I just saw. Really weird. I’m running a bunch of different decryption methods on it now to try and see what is going on.”

“It’s just so odd, why through this boy’s IP? Do you reckon he even realizes?”

“I mean, I just played back your conversation, clearly he has noticed the bots showing up at his door.”

“Yeah, but he must just think it’s because of his health system glitch, not anything else.”

“Yeah George…” Sapnap paused. “But what else do you think this could even be?”

They sat there in silence for a moment. Suddenly Sapnap exclaimed,

“The hell?”

“What?” George replied.

“Look at this,” Sapnap shared his screen into George’s glasses feed. And George saw that one of Sapnap's decryption keys had worked.

But, the corrupted file, the entire file, had just been whittled down to one word, from the decryption process:

**Nightmare**.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading again! (edit 1/9: minor changes)


	3. nightmare?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shocked by what happened previously, George and Sapnap try to understand what happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a bit of a short chapter, but the next one goes into more of a flashback :]

George stared, with his mouth slightly open. Sapnap didn’t make a sound. Both of them sat in their call, in utter silence, for an entire minute, at a loss for words.

Sapnap cleared his throat.

“George… I don’t understand.”

George gulped. It had been a long time since he saw that moniker. This was definitely not about that boy in the apartment anymore.

“Sapnap, I– how is this possible?”

“I don’t know, George. I don’t know at all. Meet me at my apartment,” Sapnap replied briskly, and left the call.

George stood frozen for a few more moments. The sound of a door opening snapped him out of his daze.

“Hey, Arcadia man? I know you said to just stay inside but I’m about to start streaming a game and I won’t be able to answer the door, so–“

“Thomas, it’s fine. I think we are done here. If I need any more information, I’ll message you or stop by again,” George replied, and began to walk back over to his Veribot still standing at the end of the street. People were watching him from inside the windows of their apartments. Veribots don’t often show up without a good reason, let alone with a human working with them, and residents of the neighborhood were beginning to take notice. Something was going on, and it was time to get the hell out of here. He sent his Veribot back to its charging station, calibrated his teleporter, and zipped right over to Sapnap's front door.

Sapnap quickly let him inside. They sat down. Stared at each other for a moment. Then George got up and began to pace.

“Sapnap, I don’t know how the hell that’s even possible. There’s no way he’s the cause of this.”

“George I– I can’t see any other explanation. Nobody but us would even know who the hell wrote that if it wasn’t for–“

Sapnap stopped short. He couldn’t finish the sentence after looking at George’s blanching face.

See, George’s failed mission wasn’t just a “failed mission.” Oh no – failed here was an epic _fucking_ disaster. Maybe that requires some more detail.

Along with George and Sapnap, two other friends of theirs had also been raised to Keeper status inside Arcadia: Clay and Freddy. Freddy still was an A-Keeper, with whom George worked from time to time.

Clay was a bit of a different story.

George, Sapnap, and Clay (who went by Dream, during their missions) had been best friends. Best friends. Inseparable members of their engineering team. So close, in fact, that they wouldn’t do missions and tasks without one another, which Arcadia allowed because they were just that good together. Dream leveled up to Keeper status in the same way Sapnap did: post-successful mission.

Dream also had a bit more of a rebellious streak than George and Sapnap and tended to also question authority more. More as in… much more.

Now we make our way to George’s failed mission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading!


	4. turned into some kind of

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> George confronts his last memory of him, Dream, and Sapnap's experiences together.

They were all inside their Veribots, controlling them from the London dispatch center. Dream, Sapnap, and George headed into the building where their target was, while the other two members’ bots stood outside. Every member of their team was aware of how dangerous their target was; his name was Techno, a hacker determined to show the world just how “dangerous” Arcadia was to society. He was committed to anarchy and releasing people from the “corruption” of their governments, or whatever. Problem was, Techno had gained control of _lots_ of Veribots, which none of them knew about as they walked in, expecting relatively peaceful surrender.

Techno was sat by his computer. Their Veribots walked up to him.

“You guys have got to know what you’re doing is wrong, right? You’re coming up to me for exercising my right to free expression and trying to suppress that. That’s wrong, you must see that.”

George spoke through his Veribot: “Techno, you need to understand you’re putting people in danger by promoting such an ideology. Arcadia has standardized so many parts of society and made it easier for people to live without suffer.”

“You’re wrong, George, and you know that,” Techno replied, sounding exhausted. “I know you don’t believe all the bullshit Arcadia has spoon fed to you guys. You just got some cool, well-paying jobs cuz you guys were good at code as teenagers, and then fell into their easy trap.”

George paused for a moment. It wasn’t the first time he had confronted himself about his feelings regarding the company’s ideology and behavior towards “rule-breakers” like Techno and others. Even coming here suited up felt a little extreme.

“Techno,” Sapnap started, “come on man. Make this easier on all of us. We respect you for what you do, but we can’t let you do this to society. You’ll put people in danger by alienating them from a system that works perfectly fine now.”

“Don’t you see? It _doesn’t_ work perfectly fine. We wouldn’t be here if it did. Why do you think I have such a problem with it? You guys get to live your best lives as untouchable millionaires while the rest of us are forced to deal with constant surveillance and control. How do you think that makes people feel?” Techno spat out. They had been through this before.

George hadn’t heard a sound coming from Dream's feed this entire interaction, which seemed odd. Dream was normally the first to yell at a rule-breaker, and then they got to joke about it afterwards.

“Techno, maybe we can make you a deal,” Dream said suddenly, to the shock of both George and Sapnap.

_[Uh, no we can’t]_ George wrote in their private chat.

_[Just trust me]_ came as response from Dream.

“Just– join us. Maybe we can figure out a more personal deal. I know I don’t always align with the company ideology either, and maybe … we could use someone with your perspective to help us change things from the inside out,” Dream said.

Sapnap: _[Uh, dream, wtf]_

George: _[^^^ we didn’t agree on this wtf are you doing]_

Dream: _[just go with it, it’s a good idea]_

Techno seemed to hesitate at this. “Dream, I don’t know if you know who you’re talking to, but I can’t join that company. You know what I’ve done against them.”

We did know.

“I know, but just maybe–“ Dream was cut off by a loud BANG coming from below us, as picked up on our bot sensors. The ground shook and George’s balance in the Veribot was thrown off.

“What the hell was that?” George exclaimed.

“Techno?” Sapnap asked hesitantly.

“I’m sorry guys, but I’ve gotta get out of here,” Techno said.

And as _soon_ as he finished the word “here,” the building’s structure started to collapse.

“WHAT IS GOING ON?!” George screamed.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” Sapnap yelled back.

Just as he said that 4 Veribots appeared out of nowhere and began to open fire on their bots.

Dream chose that moment to finally speak up: “We need to blow this building up.”

“What the hell, Dream? Just keep shooting, we can get out of here without exploding an entire good building, _and_ killing Techno” George replied, frustrated. “Are you out of your mind?”

“We won’t kill Techno. We need to go now or else we’ll lose control over this entire situation.” Dream said, surprisingly calmly.

“Clay, I’m leading this fucking mission, we can’t do that. Can you HELP US? Where the fuck is this even coming from? What the hell is wrong with you?!" George yelled back.

“I’m sorry guys, I can’t.”

“Dream?”

The building began to explode from the base up. Sapnap, George, and Dream logged out of their Veribots and watched from their teammates’ cameras separately on their monitors as the building disintegrated into nothing, along with Techno and their bots. Still in call, George was furious.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Clay? What the hell was that? That was my fucking mission!”

“I’m sorry, George, I’m so sorry. Techno has a point. We can’t live like this.” Dream logged out of the call, leaving behind a message:

**I can’t be a part of this anymore. It’s turned into some kind of Nightmare**.

And it was the last they’d heard from him since. Gone without a trace. Quit working at Arcadia and nothing left behind, turning his back on his best friends in the process. Arcadia sent out tons of Keepers on missions to search for him with absolutely no avail. Since Dream had managed his Veribot from home that day, he escaped without a trace. Dream was smart; he was recruited originally because he was such a skilled coder. He wouldn’t be caught unless he wanted to be.

That was 4 years before, in 2038.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again! hopefully ill get a little more motivated for plot from now on :]


End file.
